People keep telling me I should quit my day job and write a book.  Or maybe they mean write a book, become a gazillionaire,  and then quit the day job. I have trouble keeping that all straight.  

Anyway, sometimes that idea sounds pretty appealing, but then I gaze  into the soulful and hungry eyes of my children, and think of how they're already eating us out of house and home. If I quit my day job I had better have a lucrative contract lined up, or they're going to hit me over the head with my laptop one day and barbecue me out in the backyard to fend off starvation.

Just kidding.  The kids are vegetarians.  More likely the neighborhood will be quickly stripped of all gardens, fruit trees, and decorative shrubbery before the chilluns eat Dad. But I'm not quite ready to quit the day job just yet.  For one thing, I have no idea what I'd write. An important rule of creative writing is that the author ought to actually know a thing or two about his subject-- About all I know for sure about my favorite subject (not THAT favorite subject. Jeesh) is that it's a miracle I haven't managed to crash my boat into an IRS building or something.  The full extent of my nautical klutziness has yet to be revealed, but I'm sure I have at least a couple more years of silly blog posts to write before disgorging a Magnum Opus.  A book might be expecting too much, unless I can discover some captivating twist involving nose hairs and varnish, or something along those lines that Wooden Boat readers might enjoy.

We have a local author, a lady who wrote some book about vampires (named Eddie or something) who fly about doing supernatural vampire things and making out with nubile young women wearing corsets. The book (now a Major Motion Picture or two or five) is causing major hormone malfunctions all over this corner of the galaxy.  Obviously, the teenage-girl-and-bloodsucking-vampire angle is hot; I keep thinking that I need to write a book like that so I can buy 16 Lexuses for my cat. But I know very little about hunky vampires.  (And even less about nubile women in corsets, now that I think about it). What I need to do is work in some kind of sailing angle.  

I suggested to my teenage daughter that we should go up to the boat, where she would lounge around on the focs'le acting like Vampire Bait while I jotted  down ideas about how to work the angle into some spine-tingling nautical Nosferatu story worthy of being picked up by Hollywood:

The sailboat was on a broad reach across the still waters of Creepy Key, the full moon shimmering off the quicksilver like surface. Belladonna was chilled, but had nothing to cover her bountiful cleavage but a Type III PFD, which would not do at all when her forbidden vampire  love, Hector, managed to gnaw his way out of the chain locker. Belladonna sighed with irritation; Captain Dad was so unreasonable! "Father," she said petulantly, "can we let Hector out now?  I promise I won't let him play with my tiller tamer anymore"

"Dammit, nubile daughter, mind your heading!  The main is luffing! Sheet it in post haste. And no we will not let that demon spawn out of his prison until we land on Forbidden Isle and buy you some clothes! And did you finish your Language Arts homework like your mother told you to? Forsooth!"

I thought that was a pretty good beginning, but the glare I received from the daughter suggested otherwise.  And having her younger brother ask what "nubile" meant kind of put the kibosh on that train of thought.  

OK,  regroup. There's that lady in the UK who was penniless when she wrote that book about a teenage wizard (and her children might have been eyeing her for supper, for all I know).  Now she has more money than God.  If I could work out some piggyback thing, I'd be golden-- After all, my boat is a West Wight Potter, and Harry Potter is serious juju capable of generating barges full of money for old whats-her-face out in England.   Harry West Wight Potter-- It's perfect.  This time it was the twin boys who received the invitation to go on location for inspiration.  They were not sure about the offer:

#1 Son: Can we bring the Wii?
Future Gazillionaire Author Dad: Uh, I guess so. No, wait a second, there's no power--
#2 Son: Will there be vampires at the boat?
FGAD: No. This is just a way to get inspired for the book.
#2 Son.  What book?
FGAD: A book I'm going to write and make all of us filthy rich.
#1 Son: I want to be a vampire.  That would be cool!
#2 Son: You can't be a vampire. You're a vegetarian.
#1 Son: You can too  be a vegetarian vampire!
#2 Son: Can Not!
#1 Son: Dad, can vampires be vegetarian?
FGAD: Uh... Go ask your mother.

So maybe the concept needs some more work. But at least I have a catchy title: Harry West Wight Potter And the Hunky Vampires Of Teenage Lust. In the Caribbean. Now with Werewolves! 

I think I'm on to something.  What do you think?

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In the days of yore, rats were a big problem on ships. They still are. One of my enduring memories of my navy life  was encountering my first rat guard on a dock line. If you've never encountered an Industrial Rat Guard before, its a conical piece of metal, about 3 feet in diameter, that encircles a hawser. Nefarious rodents bent on invading one's vessel are confounded by the thing and cannot scurry up the rope to the ship proper. It took me a moment to figure out what those odd-looking thingies were when I first saw them. When the realization bloomed I was just amazed that we still had to worry about that in the 20th century. Once I gained that insight, other things began to make sense as well-- The  quarterdeck, for  example: It was manned 24/7, and not simply to give the drunken sailors something to salute on their way back aboard.  Maybe the tradition arose out of the the necessity to make sure no 4-legged vermin snuck aboard via the wide gangplank along with the enlisted men.  What better way to prevent that than to station some of your basic junior braid out there, monitoring the quarterdeck and keeping a weather eye for rats attempting to infiltrate?  And it wouldn't hurt in case some random admiral decided to come aboard and inspect the heads at O dark-thirty, either.

The rat guards seemed to work pretty well, as I never saw any (four-legged) rats on any of the ships I served on.  Too bad they never invented a cockroach guard.  We had lots of cockroaches.  Big ones, little ones, hissing ones, squeaking ones, flying ones, black, brown and yellow ones.  All of them very quick and far too creepy-crawly for my liking. I suppose it shouldn't have been too surprising considering some of the vermin-infested hellholes we visited during our cruises overseas. Most of the time the bugs stayed well hidden, being sensitive creatures who like us even less than we like them. But if you timed it right, you could come full face with the secondary crew that cohabits any ship. My most impressive such encounter was when I was enduring mess duty. 

On the Navy ships your privilege as an enlisted peon is to spend some period of time as a galley slave. No military ship caries enough cooks to perform all the dirty jobs that feeding hundreds, or thousands of men involves, so the solution is to yank random low-value enlisted me out of their normal assignments and consign them, for months, to the depths of the kitchen to perform all the foul deeds that the real cooks were too busy to handle. Have you ever peeled 500 pounds of potatoes?  If not, you have not truly experienced life, I assure you.  Most of the time, though, the cooks did not trust us to actually handle real food.  Instead, we galley slaves were tasked with cleaning up after the horde had finished each of the four meals served at sea. Much of this was the expected stuff, not unlike being a husband-- Take out the garbage, refill the ketchup dispensers, slop the hogs (well, fishes), wipe the vomit off the walls when conditions were stormy, that kind of stuff.  All good fun. I was one of the slaves toiling in the scullery, which was a small steam-filled room right out of Dante's Inferno containing a large machine whose purpose was to wash vast piles of unimaginably nasty dishware.  The sailors would deposit their trays through a small window; we'd toss the food detritus and leftovers and place the trays in racks.  When the rack was full, we'd shove the rack into the maw of the machine, and with any luck, the beast would scrub the trays and silverware shiny clean, to emerge steaming hot out the rear of the machine.

One quirk of the scullery was when the dishes had all been done, we'd have to clean the machine itself. We found that the best way to do that was to drop a packet of Bug Juice into the water reservoir and run the thing for about 15 minutes.-- When finished, the machine was gleaming inside.  Bug Juice, in case you've never encountered it, was what passed for  Department Of Defense kool-aid back in the 70's Navy.  It was green, or red, or kind of yellowish, and tasted like, well, koolaid, I suppose.  I stopped drinking the stuff after I witnessed what it did to the insides of our big stainless steel washing machine.

Anyway, one night after we had finished the job  and closed everything up, one of us peons realized that we hadn't run Bug Juice through the dishwasher.  Being the most superfluous peon, I got "volunteered" to go back and complete the vital mission. I made my way back to the mess decks, and slid open the door to the dark  scullery.  As I did so I thought I heard something, but as the sound didn't repeat, I figured I was imagining things.  I fumbled around for the light switch, and when I finally found it, flipped it on.

The secret life of the scullery was thus revealed to me.  The walls were moving. Thousands of large, small, and medium cockroaches were scurrying around every surface of the scullery-- Walls, ceiling, benches, floor. I stood there, stunned, and watched a teeming mass of bugs fleeing the light.  It was like a horror movie.  In the scullery, No One Can Hear You Scream, to paraphrase the Alien movie. But the last thing they were interested in was some filthy human, and within seconds they had vanished from sight, save for one befuddled bug who circled around on the ceiling in a panic  before finally breaking loose and dropping to the floor three feet in front of me. Cockroach Fail, dude. In seconds even that poor klutz had disappeared into the nether regions of the scullery.

Never mind 500 pounds of potatoes; if you have not walked into a dark room containing 500 pounds of cockroaches, you have not lived.  Try it some time!

Fast forward 34 years. I was thinking about this because of the sailing trip I took last weekend. You see, about two years back, we picked up a mouse on board the Potter. It seems the rodent snuck into a grocery bag full of provisions that  I had foolishly left in the garage overnight.  Now, I normally try to rescue any critter that won't hurt the kids, wife, pets, or myself. I am very proud of a humane mousetrap I constructed one time, for example,  to catch a mouse who was living under our oven; using a baking sheet, casserole dish, bamboo skewers, and peanut butter,  I did MacGuyver proud and we were soon admiring a totally cute, and totally terrified little creature the trap had snared.  I released the animal, unharmed, in the yard of a cranky neighbor who was always complaining about everything in sight. That was one of my prouder moments, and one of the few times I have  provided a positive example for the children. 

We won't talk about my alternative role as Ninja Scorpion Assassin, in which I prowl around the house exterior  in the dark with a UV light and death ray spray can to  dispatch any scorpion I can find. The Wife is adamant that our children shall not be stung by scorpions, so I do my manly duty. Even after Cocktail Hour.  I don't like killing scorpions one bit, but it's them or us.

But I digress. As much as I wanted to, I wasn't likely to catch the mouse using my baking pan-casserole-dish contraption, not on a boat in dry storage 100 miles from my house.  Every time we went sailing, I cleaned up the mouse poop and left the companionway wide open, with stuff piled nearby, so the critter could escape.  But for two years, the mouse remained stowed away despite my best efforts. I don't know what the thing was eating, or how it survived inside its fiberglass prison, but it did.  (I tell you, anything that lives in the desert is seriously tough, from the plants upwards. Even the grass has spikes).  I finally had enough the last time I took the boat out, and set a trap for the mouse.  Last weekend, I opened the boat up and discovered the dessicated corpse of my little stowaway. 

That evening, Felicidade was securely anchored in Why Cove. I was relaxing in the cockpit, watching the airplanes on their trajectories to and from Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix, 80 miles away. The stars were twinkling, the moon was creeping up from behind the ridge to the East, which was backlit with a soft glow. The land around me was dark and mysterious, with a single light visible far across the lake on the shoreline, probably some campers. Ducks floated by in the still water, and every few minutes, a fish would jump for an insect. It was beautiful and peaceful, and kind of lonely.

 I had decided to come alone this time, not wanting to expose the kids to the murdered mouse. Swinging alone on the hook, I was feeling guilty about the mouse, and for some reason, very isolated from the rest of the world. I thought of my family back at the house, executing the nighttime rituals, and considered calling them, but the phone had no service.  So I sat there and thought about life. My eyes were drawn, over and over, to the solitary light miles away in the distance, as if I could extract some small measure of companionship from people who had no clue that I was hidden in the dark land across the water from their campsite. It was an interesting feeling, the solitude.  It was tolerable, knowing the the next day I would be back at home cleaning up cat barf while the kids raised hell all over the house. But for an hour or two I felt a taste of what a long-distance solo voyager must feel when the land falls below the horizon. Most of the time I am untroubled by such solitude; this time, though, it was kind of difficult to deal with.

I toasted my friends across the lake, and my former stowaway,  with my wine glass. Then I fired up the IPod.  Soon I had rousing music heralding the moonrise, and Two Buck Chuck easing the loneliness.  Dinner was soon ready, and Life Was Good.  Again.  But I was happy to get home the next day.

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I think I spent more time agonizing over the name of my boat than I did over the names of my children.  The kids were actually pretty easy-- Though it was tempting to just make stuff up ("La Velveeta"), the Trophy Wife put the kibosh on anything too insane. We ended up stringing various combinations of family names together to come up with kid labels that won't cause the children to sue our pants off when they turn 18. So our kids have distinctive names that reflect family history, and stand out in a sea of Madisons and Jacobs in the school classrooms.  And they don't cause snickers amongst immature people like me.

The process had its ups and downs (Wife: "We are not naming this child Samson Bookum, you idiot."), but we always wrapped it up well before the anticipated delivery date. Having twins did throw a bit of a curve in the deliberations, I'll admit. It's bad enough coming up with a name for one kid-- Try it for two. (Or ye gods, imagine being Octomom!). I for one probably  enjoyed the process more than I should have:

So The Wife moderated my loonier nomenclature urges, and the children probably won't end up in therapy, or starring in a Woody Allen movie.  Sometimes I don't appreciate the woman enough.

Anyway, the birth of my boat was almost as exciting as the arrival of my offspring. It was certainly a cleaner process, and there were not as many frightening noises involved. But once I had this big shiny white blob sitting in my backyard, the task of naming her hit me like a breaking sea. Right off the bat, The Wife categorically vetoed any name that referenced her: "I don't want my name plastered on the sides of this thing when you run it up on the rocks," she explained, fixing me with a steely glare.  She was not thrilled with my counter-offer to use a random ex-girlfriend's name, either, for some reason.

I solicited names from my relatives, which produced many interesting suggestions, the rejection of  which caused sporadic eruptions of hurt feelings across the  nation. Imagine explaining to you mother in law why you rejected her third cousin's fourth daughter's middle name: "Kudzu is a fine middle name, for sure,  but I don't think it will fit my boat's personality, thank you very much."

I figured I could go hit the interwebs for a boat name.  After all, there are pet name generators (now I know that somewhere out there are ferrets named Angel Poof, and Weazle Beans),  and baby name generators (Maximus Jasper, Bucephalus, Mbelisame, Blade); there had to be a boat name generator. Sure enough, I found a bunch of those.  Some of them even showed what your chosen name would look like plastered across an unsuspecting transom, so you could try it on for size:

As cool as that was, when I randomly generated names, most of them were pretty stupid, even by my standards.  Wet Dream? Puh-lease. After a while I bailed on the Boat Name Generator approach.  I was beginning to feel kind of dirty, and felt the boat deserved better than to be saddled with a name like Aquaholic or Fuddle Duck.  My next tactic, searching the internet for lists of boat names, was kind of depressing, because I found that all the imaginative, unique names I came up with were already assigned to thousands of lesser boats. Kismet-- What a great word, and perfect name for my boat.  Unfortunately, it's a perfect name for other people's boats too.  Including powerboats. 

I was not going to sully my boat with a name favored by stinkpots, dammit.  No Kismet, Obsession, or Money Pit. No Second Mortgage, even.  None of that.

As the maiden voyage weekend approached, I was starting to become desperate. Being a loyal (and appropriately superstitious) subject of King Neptune, a shellback no less, there was no way was I going to sea in an unnamed boat. If I had to name the thing Weazle Beans, I would. I figured that worst case, I could rename the boat when I finally came up with a decent name.  To see what was involved in that process, I googled the renaming ceremony. The steps varied, but for the most part it didn't look too bad, except for the part where you either toss a glass of champagne to Old Neptune, or have some virgin pee on the front of your boat.  What?  Who came up with that?  It's bad enough if someone (virgin or not) barfs on my boat;  I'm not going to let somebody take a whiz all over the foredeck just to complete a stupid renaming ceremony! And as for wasting good booze, shame on you.

Inspiration struck in the middle of the night. I have a bunch of sailing books, of course--  Why not pick a name from the famous boats that I admire?  Not original, I'll admit, but oozing history and meaning. I leapt out of bed and started dragging books off the shelf. Boat names flew by: Trekka, Gypsy Moth, Dove, Tillikum, Spray, Seraphyn.  Nice names, all of them, but none hit the sweet spot.  The last book I picked up was Desperate Voyage, by John Caldwell.  There it was! Pagan.  A perfect name for my boat. Short and sweet. Kind of mysterious, exotic even. And I was getting pretty Desperate to take a Voyage, to be sure.

But The Wife vetoed Pagan. No amount of whining would get her to change her mind. And since I was lobbying for the funds to put the boat in a wet slip at the lake, I felt I had little choice but to accommodate her.  Liberdade, the name of Joshua Slocum's junk-rigged boat, was also summarily dismissed. Grumbling, I retreated to the man-cave to lick my wounds. While licking, I fantasized that I was out on the water, sailing my anonymous little plastic boat.  That would make me happy. Happy... Happiness... Felicidade! The name just kind of poured over me like warm honey.  The Portuguese  spelling of happiness-- Slightly exotic, and meaningful. To my relief, The name was approved by The Admiral.

The name Felicidade has worked out pretty well. Being on the  boat certainly promotes happiness for me, and The Wife is rid of me for a few hours, which seems to improve her mood.  It's a fairly unique name, and if I stretch a little I can almost tie it back to Slocum's Liberdade. So I am happy with it, even if it wasn't my first choice.

But if we have another kid, I'm immediately sneaking downstairs to the hospital office and christening the little cherub Pagan.  Then I'll flee the country in Felicidade before The Wife finds out. Ha!

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The Wife has finally reached the snapping point with the cheapo heads toilets in our house. The damn things keep clogging, with the result that our children are now experts with the plumber's helper at far too tender an age. They complain bitterly about having to do the nasty deed, at which point I remind them that such tasks are precisely the reason we had children in the first place. For some reason that doesn't seem to help their attitude, the ingrates, which makes Wife cranky. Which means we went on a toilet shopping spree one recent day. While giving a test-sit to one particularly fine model in the showroom, my thoughts wandered to a place far, far away. The lake, to be exact.

I follow with squeamish fascination the tales of the Real Sailors (those with installed heads, as opposed to us wannabes) who not only have to deal with clogging on a regular basis, but in order to resolve the issue have to disassemble a Rube Goldberg-level device with numerous crap-encrusted springs, valves, diaphragms, hoses, flappers, pistons, seacocks, siphon breaks, and probably even ball bearings, motors, and Large Hadron Colliders.  After they finish chasing down random parts which are trying to escape to the bilges, the Real Sailor gets to put the whole mess back together again.  Apparently it is traditional to perform these tasks in a seaway, encouraging the most propulsive bouts of seasickness imaginable.  Great stuff.

I am more of the bucket-and-chuck-it school. I have little patience with recalcitrant and complex widgets, especially when they're emitting clouds of sewer gas in my face or dripping unmentionable goop.  Of course I have a porta potti on my boat (and it is actually a pretty civilized little plastic marvel), because I do entertain hopes of convincing the occasional human female to come sailing with me. But even the porta-potti is kind of scary, mostly because of the odd squishing effects (caused by heat softening the plastic) when one tries to use the thing in the Arizona Summertime. It's kind of unnerving, to the point that my preteen twin boys refuse to have anything to do with it. Out on the lake, I hold a boy by the scruff of his life jacket, angled out over the side of the boat, so he can pee.  We try to remember to pee downwind. One time I actually had both boys angled off simultaneously-- While sailing.  That was cool. Not sure how well this will work when the boys outweigh Dad, though. (That'll be another post).

I will grudgingly use a porta-potti, if for nothing else than to keep the federales off my back. But when the rebellion happens, I'm there, man!  I'll even drive over to West Marine and buy a cedar bucket. Vive la caca!

But I digress. The Wife, being a diligent researcher, decided to google toilets in order to figure out what we were going to buy.  After 4 days of googling she landed on YouTube, where thousands of people have posted videos of their toilets flushing.  I am not joking. Go there yourself and check it out (not at work, though, OK?). Some people actually are trying to provide a service, by reviewing their particular Porcelain God, or  comparing Brand X to Brand Y, but a disturbing number are happily filming the toilet flushing away, even with nothing in it, each flush saluted with a pleased thumbs-up or cheerful comment by the cameraman. Lots of people flush goofy stuff in a disconnected toilet, just to watch the bowl drain successfully into a bucket, after which much self-congratulatory glee happens as the camera zooms in on the floating golf balls, smurf toys, or whatever. These people are the Polanskis of Poop.  The Kubricks of Caca. The Fellinis of Feces. The Spielbergs of... Well you get the picture.

One suggestion for those of you out there who are tempted to post videos of your toilet on YouTube: Please describe the nature of the simulated effluent at the beginning of the video, not the end. One guy began with a bowl that looked like the aftermath of a Mexican vacation gone tragically awry. After grossing out the entire internet, he tells us at the end of his video that the noisome concoction was actually just  innocent salt and pepper. Yeah.  Thanks for that.

Not that the manufacturers are any better.  One video had a perfectly normal looking young lady hand-dropping ANSI Standard Simulated Turds into the bowl, each splashdown accompanied by a loud kerplunk of the sort we all know and love.  There was even some kind of-- I kid you not-- template affixed to the seat-- so she had a hole for proper aiming. For good measure she tossed in some precisely wadded up TP,  then flushed the rather unfortunate-looking bowl contents away. She caught the discharge in a colander and held it up, smiling broadly, for our inspection. The video was rated five stars by thousands of viewers.

I realize now that our civilization is doomed.

Anyway, we bought some toilets. Installing them will hopefully be the closest I ever come to the Real Sailor Ritual of getting up close and personal with a diabolical poop machine. So on to the Real Topic.

This post was originally going to be about Typhoons, Hurricanes, and Thunderstorms, but it got hijacked by the Honey-Let's-Go_Shopping-For-Six-Hours festivities.  Considering how long I have been bloviating so far about bodily functions, in order to forestall any complaints about how tedious this post is, I will condense the Typhoon/Hurricane part down to the following:

If you are a trailer sailor and get caught in a Typhoon/Hurricane, then with all due respect, you're a dope and deserve to have your boat deposited upside-down atop an apartment building 15 miles inland.

Alright, then. The coolness of owning a trailersailer came home for me one summer evening a couple of years back. Up to that point, I was certainly very pleased to own a new 19-ft sailboat, but a smallish part of my envy gland was wishing that I was piloting a Valiant 40 over the horizon to Bora Bora instead. I hadn't quite assimilated the "Small boat, Big adventure" philosophy so well encompassed by Small Craft Advisor.

So it was a typical Arizona Monsoon day, with ginormous thunderheads poofing up over the mountains as the Boys & I launched the boat and set off in search of adventure. Because we got a late start, we didn't get a lot of sailing in before it was time to motor off to an anchorage for the night. After about 20 minutes we dropped anchor in the chosen spot, a fairly well protected nook.

After I set the hook and turned off the outboard, the peace and calm I was expecting failed to materialize. I could hear a nearly continuous rumble of thunder from the West, and in the twilight I saw the poofy thunderheads were closer, and arcing and sparking like a discotheque.  It was pretty, but now I was on a boat. With a big shiny aluminum mast. Held in place by a suddenly very puny hook in the mud.

My snug anchorage was protected from most directions, but an Arizona monsoon storm can attack from anywhere. When it hits, it is not uncommon to experience microbursts that snap a mile of thick power poles like toothpicks.  Two years back we had 100 MPH gusts a mile from our house. Worried, I flipped open the cell phone and called The Wife, who in turn fired up the computer and checked the radar for me.  Sure enough, solid red and mad as hell, and heading right for us.  ETA, 1 hour. "Idiot. Don't kill my babies." counseled The Admiral.

Leaping into action,  I yanked the anchor up. As soon as it was secure, we fired up the outboard and made haste back to the launch ramp. In record time we got the boat out of the water and lowered the lightning rod as the strobe lights closed in on us. It was just starting to rain when we parked the boat in the campground next to the ramp.   Eager to try a vicarious Fastnet Force 10/Perfect Storm simulation, We climbed into the boat and battened down the hatches.

Then it hit.  The wind rose to a shriek, rocking the boat on the trailer. Rain slammed the fiberglass hull, making an amazing racket and spurting in through the edges of the companionway. And the lightning. FlashBLAM!  it was right over us, and nearly continuous.  The boys and I grinned at each other.  This was exciting!  Then the hail started.

Right about that time I had an epiphany.  I thought about experiencing this exact same weather out on the water.  With each blast of wind I could imagine worrying about whether the anchor was going to hold. Each blast of lightning might have had our mast beckoning to it. If this cell had hit 1 hour previously, while we were at the anchorage, it would not have been fun-- It would have scary.

But we weren't scared.  This was actually exciting and fun. Right then I realized how utterly cool it is to be able to yank your boat from the teeth of a fierce storm. With a minivan, no less.

As the virtual typhoon raged around us, I took the opportunity to tell the boys of some of the epic storms various sailors had endured at sea, and watched as they imagined, wide eyed, being in this boat, on the water, struggling to keep off a lee shore while a storm pounded away.  I don't think that any dry retelling of a sea story ever matched our experience huddled in the cramped cabin of the Potter that night as the storm raged around us.  It was all very cool until #2 Son announced that he needed to use the head, right at the height of the tempest.

Said boy resolutely cracked the companionway door and scurried topsides into the deluge.  "Dad," he called, "hold my jacket for me." It took me a couple of seconds to realize what he was planning.  I leapt out of the cabin and fixed #2 son with a steely glare befitting of the Captain.  No way I was going to let him pee off the side of the boat in the campground parking lot.   Especially with the elderly campers in the pop-up next door staring curiously at us through a foggy plastic window.

So #2 Son got the full Cape Horn treatment as he climbed down off the boat in the midst of the deluge, buffeted by hail, rain and wind, with thunder and lightning crashing around us. I watched with fatherly pride as he made his way to the campground head, then ran back to the boat, climbed aboard, and dove into the cabin, soaking wet.

Truly, if you are going to go through a gnarly storm in your trailer sailer, the best place to do it is in the parking lot. That, next to the ability to go to windward at 60 knots, is one reason I love small trailerable boats.  No more Valiant 40 envy.  Well, not much anyhow.

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I like water.  Big surprise there, I'm sure most people like water, especially sailors. Water floats our boats, after all.  It does other less important stuff, too-- Makes forests grow, produces food, and carves gigantic tourist attractions out in the boonies for our amusement. Water makes the ice in highballs, it is the primary constituent of beer and wine, and if you lose the corkscrew over the side, you can actually survive by drinking straight water until you reach civilization again. Great stuff.

Sailors have an interesting relationship with water.  We prefer to skim over the top, and get cranky when our boats submerge. We throw large quantities of money into building a nice hull to keep the water out, then turn around and drill holes in it to let the water back in. We love the refreshing calm of a nice quiet anchorage, and the adrenaline charge of a boisterous bay or mountain lake. Water outside the boat, good.  Water inside the boat, bad, unless it's in a tank.  If the tank is full, good.  If the full tank is connected to the head, bad.

Most people never give water a second though beyond turning a faucet or flushing the john, but anyone commanding  a vessel interacts with water in a rather fundamental way. It's part of the magic of sailing.

The interface between water and not water is an interesting place. I am spending a lot of time trying to master that interface, because I'm always poking and prodding the nooks and crannies of my local lake. I don't know why, but for me the fascination is not necessarily sailing from Point A to Point B, (notwithstanding all the coolness that entails), but the slow unveiling of a small cove's nether regions. Or even approaching a dock, or trying not to run over some dingleberry swimming by the launch ramp. To me the thinner the water, the the more jagged the interface, the more challenging the approach, the more fun.

Indulge me in a Melon Farmer digression for a minute. I get to play with the interface even when I'm not sailing, because I live in an orchard. Every two weeks during the summer I have to irrigate.  The Water District tells me when the water is coming, and at the appointed time I wander through the trees to open six valves. When the water arrives, it's a force to be reckoned with. A typical irrigation brings enough water to cover most of my land with a foot of water; if I don't manage it, it manages me and I end up watering the driveway, the road, the neighborhood, half a mile of dirt road. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at managing water on my land-- I built berms and spillways, and can snap the whip and make the beast go where I want it.  Unless a gopher has decided to drill through one of my berms, in which case a few panicked minutes with a shovel usually finds me standing triumphant, albeit mud-spattered and sweaty.  I employ five cats to deal with the gophers, but sometimes they slack off.

When I first moved to Arizona, I decided to build an underground greenhouse.  It's not as silly as it might sound-- My plan was to use the earth to moderate some of the fierce heat of the summer. So I dug a huge hole by hand in the side yard, a hexagon 15 feet across and six feet deep. (I like digging holes, okay?) The neighbors would come by to check on the progress and scratch their heads over the nut digging an underground greenhouse. My project was going well until I had a berm break one day.  A big berm break. I watched probably two thousand gallons of water, leaves, grapefruit, cat poop, bugs, and god knows what else pour into my greenhouse until I had a nice little inland sea going. Oops.

I gave up on the underground greenhouse idea after a couple of repeat gopher-induced floods. Three dump trucks of dirt later, the hole was filled in. The neighbors were confused. They asked my why I filled the huge hole up.  "because it's done," I replied,  as if I were stating the obvious.  The neighbors backed away slowly.

A word of advice: Don't  build an underground anything on the same land you flood irrigate. Trust me on that.

Anyway, sailing is kind of the same thing (except there are fewer dead bugs and grapefruit). You have to manage water.  Lots of water. Fail to manage water, and it doesn't matter how well you've set the sails. Managing water means not letting too much of it into your boat, of course, but also making sure that you actually have water where you need it, and gently interacting with those places lacking water.  Any schlub can throw a bunch of fenders over the rub rail, and blast away with the engine when coming in for a landing.  To me, a big part of being a sailor is being able to do the same without needing fenders.  or even an engine (when I'm feeling frisky). 

I'm still working on it.  I hardly ever have to pull thorns out of the hull any more. And I still buy epoxy in little tubes, from Home Depot. So I must be doing something right.

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For those of you who are unfamiliar with the TV showAmerica's Funniest Home Videos, it's a long-running (20 years) American program in which people send in their home movies for comedic effect. Each show varies, but the general theme includes a fair amount of time devoted to videos of people screwing up in assorted amusing ways. Think "hold my beer and watch this!" and you won't be too far off, though there are plenty of barfing-at-the-wedding or felling-tree-onto-the-house kinds of videos as well. Sprinkle in the obligatory cute little kid and pet videos, and you have a pretty entertaining show.

I have found AFV to be an invaluable parenting resource. My children have watched this show basically their entire lives. When one of my kids (usually a boy kid for some reason) is on the verge of doing something that will almost certainly result in serious nard damage, say riding a bike off the roof into the swimming pool, I don't pre-emptively freak out, I just calmly remind said Boy of the outcome of a similar effort by some painfully racked performer on the TV show. Invariably, said Boy reflects for a moment, then agrees to climb down off the roof and return the colander helmet to the kitchen. No nard damage whatever. It's great. No arguments, no testosterone-poisoned bravado, just a calm recognition that what seems to be a great idea may not in fact be so brilliant.

(A friend suggests that the TV show Cops might be an equally valuable resource. I think I'll save that one for when puberty happens-- in case the boys are tempted to buy wife-beater T-shirts.)

For Christmas a couple of years back,  we bought a trampoline for the kids. Now around here, parents seem to be of three distinct minds with regard to trampolines: The first group also purchases this protective net thing that wraps around the trampoline, ostensibly to prevent Junior from launching himself sideways into a fence, car, or running wood chipper. That's understandable, their kids probably have not had the training that America's Funniest Home Videos so generously provides, and are highly likely to attempt suicide if not securely contained in a circus net.

The second group is slightly less paranoid, and digs a huge hole to place the net-less trampoline at ground level. This certainly eliminates the hazard that an elevated platform presents, but does little to prevent junior from executing a flawless, low-altitude half-gainer into the patio firepit. Plus, the semi-concealed nature of the trampoline can cause issues when one is drunkenly stumbling about the backyard in the dark, buck naked in a thunderstorm. We've all been there, right?

The last group, including yours truly, simply tries to position the trampoline out in the open, where when the child turns into a misguided missile they can be reasonably sure of not landing on anything too sharp, hard, or expensive (We also try to avoid nearby power lines just in case). This category of parent is split into two sub-groups: Those with video cameras, and those who watch AFV. The people with video cameras at the ready capture hours of video showing gooberheads having painful fun with physics. They then send these videos to the producers of America's Funniest Videos, who in turn show them on the TV show. Parents like me force our kids to watch said unfortunate impromptu acrobats, thus imbibing our precious offspring with what amounts to tribal knowledge, of the non-gooberhead variety. It's like survival of the fittest by TV Training -- Darwin would be so proud.

Anyway, when I am sailing, I find myself constantly running a "what would AFV do?" subroutine in the back of my mind. Now I'm sure that everyone reading this (being a salty bunch, yarrr) has some equivalent subconscious safety program running in their minds too, but I submit that safety knowledge gleaned from a book, no matter how good that book is, is no comparison to watching some fool bust his nuts on a bow pulpit. And then laughing about it.

I know, for example , that it is never a good idea to take a flying leap for the dock as you approach. AFV has hilariously demonstrated how that can go wrong, many times. As soon as I am tempted to take such a leap, the little video shows in my reptilian fore brain and I suddenly have an attack of common sense. I veer off and try a different strategy, one that (usually) does not result in nard damage. I never learned that from K. Adlard Coles.

I know that screwing around on a wet foredeck in bare feet can result in a spectacular triple gainer, bouncing off of various boat parts, until you finish with a nice belly flop. Then you get to watch your boat sail itself over the horizon without you (the one time it sails by itself without you tending the tiller, of course). The Bluejacket's Manual has nothing to say about that, I assure you.

AFC has taught me the wisdom of approaching the dock slowly, instead of at full speed. This is one sailor who is not going to launch Grandma over the bow pulpit as we pulverize an innocent bystander's dingy under a full-sail docking maneuver.

So, I think that any serious safety-minded sailor should put away the sailing books, crack open a beer, and watch America's Funniest Home Videos. This especially applies to those of you who also own jet skis. You know who you are. Let the other guy do dumb, klutzy, or insane stuff so you don't have to, and we'll all be happier in the long run. And we won't have to use the boathook to gaff grandma out of the bay.

For the rest of you, please remember to bring the video camera, OK?  The safety of my children depends on you.

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Then Life interfered, and I detoured mostly ashore for a while. Somewhere in that detour I discovered the joys of exploring bug-infested backwaters where one could nose into a reed bed and scramble up the hill looming over the boat to take a nice picture. Tying up to a marginal weedy bush instead of carrying five different anchors and 3,000 feet of chain. waking up in a cozy cove, silent and peaceful instead of listening to the neighbor's generator all night long. As that process unwound, my idea of a heroic boat also underwent a few revisions. The prospect of equipping and managing a boat to cross an ocean seemed less appealing the more I thought about it.

I subscribe to a couple of sailing magazines besides Small Craft Advisor. I like to see how the other side lives, and it sure is nice looking at the latest fancy sailboats. The other magazines provide a view into a vastly different world of sailing than I inhabit, which leaves me alternating between wistful envy and amused horror.

Those magazine are rather amusing. To start, I don't think that any of the boats advertised in there are under 35 feet long. Sure, that is much more comfortable that my 19-foot Potter, but when one of those things runs aground thanks to the 5-foot draft, it's a whole different experience for them than it is for me. If I'm lucky, a few energetic strokes with the paddle, or maybe a good pole off with the boathook and I'm back in action. If I'm really stuck I crank up the daggerboard a couple of inches, sail off, then crank it back down. That's generally not how it works when you run your floating Condominium up on the sandbar. In fact, pretty much everything about those big boats is more serious. If I jibe accidentally, I can sometimes snag the mainsheet and slow the boom down as it flies across. If I tried that with one of those serious ships, I'd launch myself over the horizon for sure. And the ginormous bludgeon would still rip some expensive chunk of hardware off the boat.

There are advantages to a bigger boat, I'll agree. Sometimes I have trouble fitting all the chow into the cooler along with enough Ice Packs to keep the stuff alive in the Arizona heat; a growing trend seems to be for new boats to have not one, but two refrigerators on board. Two Fridges! Now that's luxury. I'm sure they can pack in a lot of beer, but then I have never had to fly a mechanic in to fix my cooler, let alone two of them. One prominent theme I pick up from these magazines is how cruising has been boiled down to "fixing your boat in a variety of exotic locations"-- I always thought that was a joke, but now I read about it in every month's issue. Two fridges!

On most days I can steer my boat by shifting my weight, without touching the tiller. The boats appearing in the other magazines have, along with the two refrigerators, two wheels. One on each side. Personally, I'd get confused if I had two wheels to choose from. It's hard enough with just the single wood thingy hanging on my rudder. And these are not little wheels, either. These are BIG. The mechanical advantage must be formidable, but you know, I never really appreciated even the dinky little steering wheel-sized helms that I've encountered in my travels-- They seemed to lack a certain liveliness that my wood stick has. I know when the Potter is overpowered, I can feel it in the tiller. If I insist, eventually she'll round up. One wonders how much feedback you get with those America's Cup-sized wagon wheels spanning the cockpit. Do you get any feedback, or does the beautiful machine hum along, the driver oblivious, until the fancy high-tech carbon fiber mylar super duper space-age rig busts a gut?

Speaking of high tech rigs, I love how every couple of years some rig innovation becomes the Next Big Thing. All the new boats have it, whatever it is. The cruising-oriented magazines tend to not emphasize the latest whiz-bang rigging, I imagine, because most of the people out there need something that will actually reliably hold their gigantic rigs up as they motorsail from Exotic Port A to Equally Exotic Port B in search of a good mechanic. Their rigs are last year's Big Thing, and they write plenty of stories about how the Wonder Crimp Rod Thingies are starting to come apart if the wind blows more than 10 knots. It's the magazines that are closer to the racing world that swoon over the latest cool stuff from the likes of the Open 60's.At one point I too drooled over stuff like Rod Rigging, until I read the follow up stories. For a few years now, I have been devolving rig-wise to the point where I am fairly sure that my next boat will have an unstayed mast (or masts). If I have to have rigging, it'll be simple, cheap, low-stress, and easily repaired. And I won't be submitting articles to the other magazines about how I spent thousands of dollars swapping out last year's Next Big Thing for this year's Next Big Thing.

I'm of two minds with regard to the navigation of a sailboat. Now I love GPS, but I shot my first celestial fix just outside of Mombasa, Kenya in the 70's, and never really shook off the romance and pure seaman-like utility of navigating the way the old-timers have been doing for hundreds of years. When I was forming my vision of myself as a World Voyager, running fixes, points drawn on a paper chart and positions established by the stars and sun figured prominently-- None of this setting the autopilot to home in on some glowing dot on the LCD while I raided the double fridges for a beer and sandwich. Pretty much every time I sail, I practice the old techniques of shooting bearings and plotting my position, even though I do have a nice little portable GPS that provides endless amusement as it shows me sailing merrily half a mile inland, over the saguaro cacti. The GPS is also extremely useful on family road trips. I keep the Wife appraised of our progress regularly: "We'll arrive in 23 minutes, 18.715 seconds, Sweetie!". She is very appreciative and only threatens to stick the thing up my hawsepipe if I update her too frequently, say more than once.

But I digress. In the magazines, Some of these sailors have electronic navigation suites that cost more than my entire boat. They have radar. They have depth finders (I have a lead line). They can see their position from space, and see what the terrain looks like under their boat. They know the temperature of the water. And yet they still manage to run up on reefs, get lost, and generally make fools of themselves fairly regularly, so much so that the Super Navigators now regularly run articles that try to keep the double-fridge crowd from making spectacles of themselves and dinging their gelcoat because they pushed the wrong button or loaded the wrong datum (whatever that is!).

But even if the Modern Navigator is on top of things, having all those electronics aboard is just asking for trouble, in my opinion. I have just one battery on my boat. It could disappear in a puff of smoke and my general nautical happiness would not be impacted in the least. Stories abound of sailors whose electrical systems gave up the ghost-- What happens when your 60 foot beauty's power grid shorts out? Not only do you no longer have the navigational video game to keep you amused, but now your electric winches, electric roller reefing, and electric refrigerators are gone as well. I would not want to find myself in that situation on a lee shore. Warm beer! Oh the humanity!

In a nutshell, I get my sailing motto from some guy named Albert Einstein (whom I think was a great sailor, or something): Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. On a small boat, that's a lot easier to do than otherwise. And, I would argue, more fun as well. This also is not a limitation on my voyaging potential-- Lots of people who think just like me have made epic voyages in small, simple boats.

Finally: A recent advice column in one of the magazines goes on at length about how to stop the bottles of wine from clanking around and disturbing the off watch; my solution is to dispense with the bottles altogether and purchase boxes of booze instead. Noise problem solved, and when you run up on the reef in a drunken stupor you can inflate the plastic bladders for additional flotation! Simple, and elegant. That's why I'm a committed gunkholer.

Although two fridges does sound kind of nice, now that I think about it...

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